The present invention relates to medical imaging systems, and in particular, to an imaging system enhancing bone images by removing normal variations based on standardized bone templates.
In the identification of skeletal diseases, a patient may be imaged, for example using: positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or single photon emission tomography (SPECT) to detect the abnormal image intensity and hence the presence bone disease.
In the identification of some skeletal diseases, such as metastasized caner lesions, a patient may be given a radioactive tracer preferentially localizing in lesions. An image of the tracer, such as 18F—NaF, may be taken casing an imaging system such as PET/CT imaging, to detect the increased presence of the tracer and hence the presence of disease in different portions of the patient.
An accurate assessment of disease is critical for evaluating the efficacy of a particular cancer treatment regime. In particular, detection and quantification of lesions in early treatment steps are critical in guiding the physician.
The selectivity of the image intensity for cancerous lesions is imperfect and for that reason the physician must analyze the images to distinguish image intensity indicating true lesions from background noise in healthy tissue. In analyzing lesions in the skeleton, this process is complicated by the fact that different hones have different background intensities independent of disease. Accordingly, the physician must mentally discount some image regions while applying greater weight to image intensity in other image regions. This inability to rely directly on the image for the identification of disease adds to the burden of the physician in reading these images potentially increasing the opportunity for error. In addition, these image variations may interfere with quantitative measurements applied to the image.